Collusive Price Leadership.

The authors study the pattern of pricing in which price changes are first announced by one firm and then matched by its rivals. In their model, this price leadership facilitates collusion under asymmetric information. In equilibrium, the leader earns higher profits than the follower. Nonetheless, if information is sufficiently asymmetric, the less informed firm prefers to follow the better-informed firm, so the leader can emerge endogenously. The authors show that the follower can benefit from price rigidity so that prices may be changed infrequently. They also show that overall welfare may be lower under collusive price leadership than under overt collusion. Copyright 1990 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.